Road to the Aegis
Congratulations to OG, Grand Champions at The International 2019.

OG rebuffed every challenger and silenced all critics as the first reigning champions in the history of The International to successfully defend their hold on the Aegis of Champions.

After a dominating Group Stage that saw them drop only two games to their fourteen wins, OG squared off against a Newbee squad that was eager to prove themselves on the Main Stage. Newbee eked out a small advantage in the early goings of game one before OG took over and snowballed to victory. The defending champs never trailed in game two, and Newbee failed to kill ana’s Juggernaut even a single time.

Next up would be the stalwart Evil Geniuses, who smashed through OG’s defenses for a convincing victory in game one that saw EG’s top cores at their best. In game two, the teams traded blows for thirty minutes before OG took over and never looked back–taking the win to push the series to a decisive game three in which OG’s ana killed every EG player at least once en route to victory.

Last year’s runners-up PSG.LGD were the next challengers subjected to OG’s dominating run. Though the elite Chinese squad were able to secure a game-one victory, game two was a one-sided stomp in which ana was again unkillable–this time on the tournament powerhouse Alchemist. Game three was a tough fight with huge net worth swings. PSG.LGD scored more kills than the OG lineup, but the end result went the way of the resilient champions, sending OG into the Grand Finals for a second consecutive year to await their next opponent.

While PSG.LGD did their best to set up a rematch by taking game one of the Lower Bracket Finals, Team Liquid proved the worthiest opponent, cracking off two straight victories to secure the right to face OG in the Grand Finals.

As had happened in the previous two rounds, OG dropped the first game to their adversaries, unable to overcome Liquid’s assault despite leveling out a 20K net worth deficit before their Ancient fell.

But from there, it was all OG. Their clever drafting and stellar play led the way to three straight victories over Team Liquid. OG sent the challengers packing and claimed the Aegis of Champions–the first players to ever raise it twice.

As bearers of the ultimate symbol of victory, these names shall forever be inscribed–again–upon the Aegis of Champions:

Looking Back
If you missed any of the tournament, or just want to relive the incredible moments and plays, head over to the Dota 2 YouTube channel, where you can find replays of the tournament, including broadcast content from in between the games. You can also find a stash of photos from the event over on our Instagram and the Dota 2 Flickr.

We would like to thank all of the players, talent, and everyone in the Dota community for helping bring this celebration to life. The International is the crowning moment of the competitive season, and without everyone’s support, none of this would be possible. We hope you enjoyed this year’s tournament as much as we did.

The Days Ahead
In the wake of The International, our next focus will be on preparing for the new Ranked Season as well as releasing some small gameplay balance tweaks. With the recent changes to Ranked Matchmaking, we’re interested to hear any feedback or suggestions you have. As always, it’s helpful to include account info and match IDs with your feedback in the contact form.

Our next major release will be arriving later this fall with The Outlanders update, featuring the two new heroes–Snapfire and Void Spirit–that we announced at the event, as well as the next gameplay patch.

The Trove Carafe for The International 2019 is now available, featuring all-new items for Bounty Hunter, Crystal Maiden, Nature’s Prophet, Arc Warden, Templar Assassin, Chaos Knight, and Tusk. In addition, each treasure you open offers the chance to receive a rare item set for Techies, very rare golden versions of the Tusk or Crystal Maiden items, or an ultra rare set for Monkey King.

The Trove Carafe also lets you support your favorite broadcast talent at this year’s event by purchasing autographed versions of the treasure. Select the desired talent from the dropdown menu when purchasing to inscribe their autograph onto the item that you unbox.

Attendee Item Drops

Fans watching the tournament live at Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai will once again have the chance to receive special item drops during the Main Event. At First Blood in each individual game, a limited number of exclusive Attendee Treasures will drop, each containing visually-unique versions of items selected from this year’s Immortals. To be eligible, make sure to register your daily code once you arrive at the arena.

The International Main Event

After four days of grueling battle, The International 2019 Group Stage is complete. Already we must say goodbye to the first two teams eliminated–Chaos Esports and Ninjas in Pyjamas.

Defending champions OG are headed to the Upper Bracket after a dominating performance. They’ll be joined there by PSG.LGD, Team Secret, Vici Gaming, Evil Geniuses, TNC Predator, Newbee, and Virtus.pro.

Alliance, Mineski, Infamous Gaming, Fnatic, Natus Vincere, Team Liquid, Royal Never Give Up, and Keen Gaming all face the threat of immediate elimination as they head into their first-round best-of-one games in the Lower Bracket on Tuesday, August 20 at Mercedes-Benz Arena.

The opening broadcast begins at 10:00am China Standard Time. Head over to The International website for more info on the tournament standings, schedule, and more.

Today’s update rolls out the exclusive ‘Majesty of the Colossus’ prestige item set for Tiny at Battle Level 255—along with the ‘Reptilian Refuge’ custom Radiant and Dire creeps at level 182—to fill out the Battle Pass rewards line as we approach The International.

Featuring completely new models for each of his Grow states, plus custom animations and effects for Avalanche and Tree Grab, the ‘Majesty of the Colossus’ can only be earned by increasing your Battle Level to 255 before the conclusion of The International 2019 Battle Pass. Players who’ve already grown to level 255 can claim this item set from the rewards line and roll into the lanes in splendor and style.

To accommodate the release of this new item set, Tiny’s item slots have also been updated and simplified to correspond to his four levels of Grow, and his materials have been optimized to allow for more robust content creation. This means he will soon become available on the workshop, and that artists will only need to focus on making items to fit four base slots and one weapon slot on any future Tiny designs.

The International Group Stage

The first Group Stage action of The International kicks off at 9:00 am on Thursday, August 15 in Shanghai. With seeding in the Main Event at stake right from the start, make sure to tune in to the main stream to see the first stage of the tournament unfold.

Today’s update delivers the second half of the Summer Scrub, focused on bug fixes and some quality of life improvements just in time for The International.

One of the first changes you’re likely to notice is the implementation of a new version of the customizable hero grid. Players can now create multiple grid presets, each with their own unique layouts and categories. You can drag and drop heroes around the grid and rename or resize different buckets to suit your needs for any situation.

We’ve also added a new alternate layout for the in-game item shop that allows you to toggle the classic column view to a new grid-style layout that retains the Basic and Upgrade sections while adding multiple grouped sub-categories for ease of use.

On the game side, we decided to do a little house cleaning related to players exploiting matchmaking, botting or transferring accounts, resulting in a fresh ban wave for cheaters today. We’ve also made multiple performance improvements focused on minimizing hitches during teamfights.

There’s also a whole host of bug fixes that you can read about over on the update page here. Thanks to everyone in the Dota community who helped us identify which things were most in need of a good scrub.

The International Group Stage is almost upon us. As the teams, fans, and broadcast crews make their final preparations for the crowning esports event of the year, it’s time to unveil some of the final details for everyone watching.

Tournament News

Head over to the in-game Compendium for a complete list of Casters and Talent for this year’s event. Don’t forget to fill out your predictions for hero picks, team results, player performance, and tournament meta. Predictions lock before the start of Group Stage play.

We’ve also launched the official tournament website for The International 2019 as a hub for keeping up with the daily tournament proceedings. As the Group Stage and Main Event progress, you’ll be able to see updated standings and new social media content posted each day from Shanghai.

Group Stage: August 15th – August 18th, 2019 – As before, two best-of-two groups of nine teams. Top four teams in each group advance to Upper Bracket, five – eight advance to Lower Bracket, bottom in each group is eliminated.

Main Event: August 20th – August 25th, 2019 – The tradition continues as 16 teams battle through a best-of-three double elimination playoff. Lower bracket first round is best-of-one, Grand Finals are best-of-five.

Media

The top eighteen Dota teams in the world have earned the right to join the final test of the Dota competitive season. As the tournament progresses, check out the main stage and behind-the-scenes action on our media page, which features all content from our YouTube Channel, event-specific Twitter feed, and Instagram.

Pubstomps

Whether you’re playing or watching, Dota is best enjoyed with friends. To help people around the world connect with each other for their own celebratory Dota events, we’ve once again partnered with Barcraft United to facilitate Pubstomp administration. Their official landing page will launch later this week to help find a Pubstomp in your area.

A comprehensive matchmaking system is an important factor in being able to enjoy playing Dota, regardless of which hero or role you prefer. Today’s update includes some engineering changes to the core matchmaking system to allow for bigger changes and better analytical capabilities. Over the next year, we’ll be spending more time focusing on various aspects of matchmaking such as intra-team balance, player conduct, new player experience, abusive behaviors, account buying, friend and teamplay aspects, high mmr matchmaking dynamics, and other issues in an effort to make the overall experience of playing Dota more fun for players of all levels. In this blog post we decided to drill deeper into the changes in today’s update and explain our thoughts.

Matchmaking involves various tradeoffs and our goal is to find the best balance between all the different factors. In order to help make progress on finding the right set of tradeoffs, today’s update includes a couple different experimental changes that will last until the end of the season. Close to the end of the season we’ll do a direct call for feedback on how the changes have worked out and use that feedback, along with data we are gathering in the meantime, to help inform the direction for the next season. We’ll also be working towards other features, such as better detection of smurfing and other abusive behaviors as the year progresses.

The first of these experiments is removing the concept of separate Solo and Party MMRs. We expect this to be the most controversial component in today’s update, as we’ve heard fair criticisms of it in the past. We can’t say that we are fully confident that this will end up being a good change either, so we’ll want to wait until the end of the season when we gather feedback and data on how it has played out after players have had a chance to absorb it. There are two major aspects with this change: 1) the teamplay and social aspect and 2) the value and correctness of the MMR value.

For the teamplay aspect: We think it is really crucial for you to not have a disincentive to play with your friends. The game currently overly emphasizes playing solo and establishes a strong social reward mechanism for this, which causes many players to prefer playing alone than with friends. We believe that bias has over time caused more negativity and unhappiness when playing Dota. Furthermore, Dota is a very teamplay heavy game and we want to consider that aspect a bit more strongly in the hierarchy of matchmaking values. We’ve considered other approaches to the friend and teamplay incentives, but they tended to do a poor job at making it feel actually rewarding to play with friends and only papered over the issue.

For the correctness of the MMR aspect: We recognize that there is a tradeoff here on the mmr data quality if the match has solo mmr numbers with party mmr numbers, however we feel that the impact of that data noise is much smaller than even we initially considered it to be early on and generally with how it is discussed online. Most of the issues related to this we think we can solve with better algorithms. Another common case is playing with a friend who has a higher mmr than you, expecting that it will cause your mmr to go higher. While that has been at least partly true in previous matchmaking system iterations, our most recent version does a fairly good job of addressing this. We have enough data to form matches that cause you to have an even chance to win by carefully choosing the opponents that have a similar makeup. At a base level, we think mathematically we are able to have high confidence that playing with a friend will not have a material effect on your average mmr value with a properly balanced matchmaker. We’ve done some testing to make sure this is true in advance of this update, however we know it’s likely there is more work to be done here and we’ll continue working on this aspect in the background during this experimental period.

Through our investigation into the topic of matchmaking volatility and how parties affect the game, we’ve noticed something that fans likely already know: players have very different comfort levels when playing core roles versus support roles. Some players perform really poorly when they play a role they are not used to, and in turn introduce a lot of volatility in the system for everyone by causing your MMR number to drift away from your actual skill level as well as causing imbalanced games.

So because of that, and because of our abiding love of having multiple MMR numbers, we are adding a new concept of Core and Support MMR numbers. In order to achieve this, we need to know what role you want to play in advance of the match being formed. So for this experimental update, we are moving the Ranked Roles feature to the base Ranked matchmaking and expanding on its capabilities. Now when you matchmake, you will have the option of selecting roles from position 1 through 5 (Safe Lane Core through Hard Support), including multiple selections. So if you like playing Mid or Offlane, you can select those two, or if you like playing Hard Support and Mid, you’ll be able to do that as well. You will be matched based on either your Core or Support MMR.

Each MMR type will also have its own leaderboard, and for the purposes of this short experimental period the existing rank will be applied as the initial rank for both Core and Support. If we end up keeping this feature in the future, there will be a separate calibration phase for each one.

These experimental changes will remain active for the rest of this season for you to try out. Sometime after The International concludes, we’ll issue a call for community feedback to help guide the next steps in our efforts to increase matchmaking quality for everyone. We hope to have your support and patience through this experiment as well as subsequent changes towards the path of making a better overall matchmaking system.

While we were initially going to release this change as part of the Summer Scrub update, the amount of significant underlying code changes required for this update introduces a lot of potential instability. So we are splitting the Summer Scrub update into two parts, this first part for a matchmaking rework, and the second part soon after for bug fixes and a few quality of life additions. We are expecting that we’ll have a lot of matchmaking related bugs to work through today, so please let us know if you run into any issues and make sure to include the matchid in your reports.